Rationale

Java deployments increasingly rely on modularity services such as OSGi. In addition, packages such as NetKernel etc would like languages to behave as services. Clojure should behave well in such environments.

Plan

Fix misfeatures that are broken in the face of modularity

add-classpath

all-ns?

Add features to make Clojure a better language-as-service

Issues

No standards for modularity of dynamically-generated code

Most systems focus on the dynamic loading of statically compiled code

Work in Progress

Clojure-contrib modularization

Work-in-progress on the "modules" branch. BUILD IS SUCCESSFUL.

Each major namespace group gets its own module.

Every module depends on a "parent" module that specifies which version of Clojure to depend on, and configuration for compile/test/build.
Library authors can override this on a per-module basis.

The "complete" module includes all other modules as dependencies and can build a clojure-contrib "uberjar."

A full build takes forever, but individual modules can be built independently.

Java EE 6

OSGi

Clojure does NOT work out-of-the-box in Equinox (OSGi implementation from Eclipse). Loading the clojure.lang.* Java classes works fine,
but initializing the Clojure runtime fails with "java.io.FileNotFoundException: Could not locate clojure/core__init.class or clojure/core.clj on classpath."

The Clojure plugin for Eclipse works around this by using an Eclipse-specific feature called "plugin buddies."